Beyond Linguistic Equivalence. An Empirical Study of Translation Evaluation in a Translation Learner Corpus
(2014)

The realisation that fully automatic translation in many settings is still far from producing output that is equal or superior to human translation has lead to an intense interest in translation evaluation in the MT community. However, research in this field, by now, has not only largely ignored the tremendous amount of relevant knowledge available in a closely related discipline, namely translation studies, but also failed to provide a deeper understanding of the nature of "translation errors" and "translation quality". This paper presents an empirical take on the latter concept, translation quality, by comparing human and automatic evaluations of learner translations in the KOPTE corpus. We will show that translation studies provide sophisticated concepts for translation quality estimation and error annotation. Moreover, by applying well-established MT evaluation scores, namely BLEU and Meteor, to KOPTE learner translations that were graded by a human expert, we hope to shed light on properties (and potential shortcomings) of these scores. 1 Translation quality assessment In recent years, researchers in the field of MT evaluation have proposed a large variety of methods for assessing the quality of automatically produced translations. Approaches range from fully automatic quality scoring to efforts aimed at the development of "human" evaluation scores that try to exploit the (often tacit) linguistic knowledge of human evaluators. The criteria according to which quality is estimated often include adequacy, the degree of meaning preservation, and fluency, target language correctness (Callison-Burch et al., 2007). The goals of both "human" evaluation and fully automatic quality scoring are manifold and cover system optimisation as well as benchmarking and comparison. In translation studies, the scientific (and prescientific) discussion on how to assess the quality of human translations has been going on for centuries. In recent years, the development of appropriate concepts and tools has become even more vital to the discipline due to the pressing needs of the language industry. However, different from the belief, typical to MT, that the "goodness" of a translation can be scored on the basis of linguistic criteria alone, the notion of "translation quality", in translation studies, has assumed a multi-faceted shape, distancing itself from a simple strive for equivalence and embracing concepts such as functional, stylistic and pragmatic appropriateness as well as textual coherence. In this section, we provide an overview over approaches to translation quality assessment developed in MT and translation studies to specify how "quality" is being defined in both fields and which methods and features are used. Due to the amount of available literature, this overview is necessarily incomplete, but still insightful with respect to differences and commonalities between MT and human translation evaluation. 1.1 Automatic MT quality scores MT output is usually evaluated by automatic language-independent metrics which can be applied to any language produced by an MT system. The use of automatic metrics for MT evaluation is legitimate, since MT systems deal with large amounts of data, on which manual evaluation would be very time-consuming and expensive. Automatic metrics typically compute the closeness (adequacy) of a "hypothesis" to a "reference" translation and differ from each other by how this closeness is measured. The most popular MT eval-